A comprehensive and impressive cluster randomised crossover study published in Lancet ID examines whether it makes sense to use single rooms (as compared with multi-bed bays) to apply contact precautions for patients known to be carrying ESBL-Enterobacteriaceae. I need to be careful what I say, because fellow bloggers Marc and Andreas are co-authors. However, the gist seems to be: don’t bother with single rooms for ESBL-E carriers – but many hospitals don’t have capacity to do that anyway, so this may not be a practice-changing finding in many parts of the world!
Year: 2019
Formatting scientific papers: a waste of time, money, and grey matter!
Those of you who have published a scientific paper or two will recognise the following process:
Format.
Submit.
Reject.
Reformat.
Submit.
Reject.
Reformat.
Submit.
Accept.
By the end of this process, not only have you lost the will to live (or ever reformat a scientific paper ever again), you’ve also wasted time = money. And chances are, the money has been entrusted to you to perform research, not reformat documents! A recently study counts the cost of this process, concluding that the average scientist spends 52 hours per person per year on formatting / reformatting scientific papers, with a cost of around $500 USD per manuscript or ~$2k per year.
Intra-operative vancomycin: to randomize or not
Today we discussed a recent paper published by our orthopedic surgeons on using powdered vancomycin in the wounds of spinal surgery to prevent surgical site infections (SSI). Two years ago I already had a post on the topic. The powder is spread deep in the wounds, on the bone and metal, before fascia and skin are closed. Yet, none of the 3 guidelines addressing prevention of surgical site infections that appeared recently recommends this intervention; WHO (2016) didn’t even include the intervention, CDC (2017) said “don’t do it”, and NICE (2019) acknowledged that the procedure is widely used without strong supporting evidence and recommended: stop doing it and do a trial. Continue reading
Infection prevention and control practices for CPE in Ontario, Canada – are we doing enough?
We’re delighted to have this guest post from Dr Alainna Jamal (bio below)…
Hello from Canada! In this blog post, I’ll reflect on findings from a study by our group (the Toronto Invasive Bacterial Diseases Network), published in this month’s issue of Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol.
Dispersal of CPE from contaminated sinks and drains: a refection from Infection Prevention 2019
I’ve spent the last couple of days up in Liverpool for Infection Prevention 2019. One of the highlights was a talk by Dr Paz Aranega-Bou on the issues around contamination of sinks and drains. Paz flagged a paper just published in JHI investigating the dispersal of CPE in a sink/drain test risk at PHE, showing the CPE can make its way from contaminated drains to sink and surrounding surfaces via splashback.
Bad things happen when you don’t do hand hygiene
This blog is usually concerned with covering the latest developments – but this post features a paper published in 1962! Have you ever wondered what would happen if you didn’t do hand hygiene? Well, this remarkable, shocking, and absolutely unrepeatable study from the 1960s gives us the answer: the result would be transmission of pathogens that can cause HCAI.
Scientists on social media: are we preaching to the choir or singing from the rooftops?
I’ve just return from a very pleasant couple of days at ICPIC in Geneva. One of the sessions there was about social medial for healthcare professionals. I’ve had a question on my mind for a while about conference tweeting – it’s good fun and helps me to remember stuff, but is it effective in sharing science outside of tight professional networks? Eli P flagged this fascinating paper, which provides evidence that Twitter can be a useful tool to share science outside of your professional network (‘outreaching’), but you need a certain threshold of followers to do it effectively.
A pore way of dying (for MDR-GNB)
The lack of new antibiotics for Gram-negative bacteria is one of the cornerstones of the global crisis of antibiotic resistance. The quest is finding a molecule with antibacterial activity that can pass the double-layered cell wall and that manages to remain in the cell long enough to kill. New lab-based studies suggest that such antibiotics may already exist, and that the solution to activate them is widely available, and for free. As these findings were published in not-so-well-known-and-hardly-read journals for clinicians, such as EMBO journal and Scientific Reports, here follows the summary for dummies (written by a dummy). Continue reading
An empty gut before surgery?
We Dutch, we love gut decontamination. Not only in critically ill patients, but also in those undergoing elective colorectal surgery. A decontaminated gut is a safe gut, and that feeling was based on data from Dutch studies. A new study from Finland, published in Lancet, now questions whether our gut feeling was correct. Continue reading
Oh, the fun you can have with a urinary catheter and a drain
We have blogged a fair bit recently about the risk of antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative bacterial contamination of sinks and drains. A new study offers a novel approach to this problem: by repurposing a balloon catheter to extend the duration of contact between a disinfectant and the sink-end of the pipe.
Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 